Garage door sensors are a very important safety feature that are meant to stop the garage door from coming down while a person, pet, or object may be in the way. There may be instances, however, when you are convinced the sensors are faulty or if you must get the garage door closed even with an intrusion. Knowing how to bypass a garage door sensor is useful knowledge, but only if you can bypass them safely and only when the situation demands. Here’s a guide on how garage door sensors operate and some temporary ways through which you can bypass a garage door sensor.
How Garage Door Sensors Work
Standard new garage doors are equipped with a pair of photoelectric safety sensors. You can see them mounted a few inches off the ground near each garage door opening. The one which is a sender emits an invisible infrared beam, and the other’s a receiver that detects that beam.
When the beam in between the two sensors is unobstructed, the receiver receives the signal, and the garage door closes normally. If something interrupts this beam – be it a child, a dog, or an errant rake – the receiver loses the signal. What happens in an instant is the garage door motor stops in its descent and reverses directions, avoiding a possible accident. The simple but excellent system became a required safety feature for automatic garage doors in the United States in 1993.
How Do You Bypass a Garage Sensor?
Yes, the garage door sensors can be bypassed temporarily. You can bypass them in the typical scenario that you desire the garage door closed, when the sensors are in misalignment or faulty and the garage door stays open. This approach is often described as a garage door sensor bypass. Bypassing should always be a short-term solution until the initial problem at hand can be fixed.
Bypassing Manually
The most immediate method to circumvent the sensors is through the use of the override from your wall control panel. Most garage doors possess a button which can be held down. Provided the button can be held in its downward position, the door will simply close and ignore the input from the sensor. You need to keep the button held down until the door lands in the fully closed position. You can’t release it halfway through and expect the door not to reverse.
At all times, you need to be present and observe the door so that nothing is in its way – this maintains some degree of safety. This is a helpful method if you’re looking for how to bypass the sensors on a garage door in a pinch.
Bypassing with Power Disconnection
Another approach includes shutting off the power to the sensors temporarily. You can do this by removing the main garage door opener from the power outlet. You can then manually close the garage door by pulling the emergency release cord – you can commonly find this cord in the form of a red rope suspended from the motor – and pulling the door closed manually. This fully disables the automatic system so that the sensors are no issue at all.
Do this only in a case where the main building has a power outage or the garage door does not close with any other method. While this is a viable solution, always remember that regular maintenance and garage door repair in South Florida is the best way to ensure your door operates reliably.
When You Need Professional Help
Bypassing your garage door sensors does not lend itself to a sustainable solution. If your sensors are consistently a problem, then they are in need of maintenance. The most common complaints are misalignment, grubby-appearing lenses, or damaged wires. You can try and clean the lenses and check the alignment, but repeated issues are best solved with the aid of a qualified garage door technician from Top Service Garage Door Repair. We can properly diagnose the problem and ensure your garage door operates safely and reliably, restoring the essential safety element the sensors provide!
